Again, while this is important info, I was making a philosophical point about museums. I was in no way casting aspersions on the USMC as a military unit. Commemorative art is particularly interesting to me. All memorials take a specific position beyond a simple remembrance of the dead. They communicate things about how the people who erected them feel about themselves and the sacrifices made. Indeed, most of our perception of ancient Greek and Roman art is drawn directly from war memorials. What we know of Sparta can be directly linked to the memorial to the 300 at Thermopylae. I'm not a soldier; I have an arts education. So I tend to look at all memorials as more than remembrances of the honoured dead.
Speaking as a retired professional soldier I think it is useful for military leaders and those who aspire to be one to visit war cemeteries and war memorials. It serves to remind people of the consequences of their decisions and actions on the battlefield in a very vivid way. I forget who said it, but there is a quote along the lines of requiring the lives of 10,000 men to train a Major-General. I don't necessarily agree with that, but there is some truth to it. Having seen untended dead rotting in the sun with wild dogs scavenging on them, I can attest that there isn't much glory in war. It is always the end result when reason, good will and toleration break down. Regrettably it is ingrained in human nature and behaviour and every generation seems to need to learn the lessons of war for themselves.
Different societies and cultures do have their own ways of both honouring their war dead and the sacrifices that they have made. I have visited British Commonwealth war cemeteries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia and I like how it is done. Always the cross with the reversed sword, the visitor's book at the gate, and the graves arranged in a certain pattern surrounded by lawns and flowers. The dead often seem to speak for themselves with their names, units, rank and age, and often a simple phrase, engraved on the headstone. 25 yrs ago I took my then 16 year old daughter to visit a couple of the Cdn cemeteries in Normandy and she found it very sobering to learn that boys were buried there who were only 2 yrs older than she was. We used to do an annual Remembrance Day ceremony at the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Damascus, very obscure and hard to locate, and I always found it to be a spot of tranquility in an otherwise noisy and messy place. I think the Cdn memorial at Vimy is about as appropriate as any other. Interestingly, Hitler viewed the Vimy Memorial after the fall of France, found it admirable, and ordered that it be unmolested. The statue of the Brooding Canadian Soldier at St. Julien, which seems to rise out of a monolith of rock, is immensely powerful, so much so that the design was never emulated.
The French memorial at Verdun is equally striking with the lower level ossuary containing the bones of thousands of unidentified dead, both French and German finally at peace with each other for eternity. I've been to Arlington and participated in a wreath laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and that is yet another way of doing it. I recently visited the Argentine memorial to their dead of the Falklands/Malvinas Conflict in Buenos Aires and saw yet another variation on the memorial theme. The WW1 German memorial at Tannenberg would have been interesting to see, but it was razed by the Soviets after WW2. The immense statue of Mother Russia on the hill of Mamayev Kurgan overlooking Stalingrad/ Volgograd would also be something to see. Ironically it overlooks the hill and surrounding fields where the field mice still gnaw on fragments of human bone, both German and Russian.
Too bad we need to keep on constructing these things. Maybe a few more visits to the ones we already have by various angry old men and politicians in positions of power would be helpful.